As noted earlier, the life of your tires starts when they're manufactured,
not when they were sold to you, or when they were installed on your car,
since their life has more to do with the aging of the compounds in the tires
than with the actual use of them.
On the sidewall of new tires, you'll find a four-digit code molded into a
rectangle. The first two digits are the last two digits of the year in the
21st century in which it was manufactured, and the last two will be the week
of manufacture. e.g. 0449 was manufactured in the 49th week of 2004.
If the code you find has only three digits, it works the same way, except
that it will be the year of the decade and the week of manufacture in the
last century. e.g. 429 would have been manufactured in the 29th week of 1994,
or maybe the 29th week of 1984! (When this system was put into place they
assumed no one would ever use a tire for more than ten years, not counting on
concours packrats who somehow could manage to produce a set of unused
Roadspeeds manufactured when their Healey was new).
So, if it doesn't have four digits, it doesn't belong on a car outside a
museum, and if the code indicates anything from 00 to 05, it's time to check
it carefully and consider changing it.
Best
Gary
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